During my several decades of computing, I’ve been through an assortment of platforms. My first computer (not counting the 8080 machine I built in college) was an Apple II. Then a couple CP/M systems (dual 600K floppies and 64K RAM!), an assortment of IBM PCs, and a long series of Macs.

Then, in the mid-90s, I abandoned the Mac. The price/performance was terrible, and this was in an era where performance still mattered. Apple’s market share had slide from more than 15% to 3% of the market, and the company’s management had clearly lost its way. They went through a difficult and costly transition to the PowerPC microprocessor, only to find that IBM and Motorola weren’t keeping pace with Intel’s performance. I wrote Apple off as a lost cause. (If you’re interested in entering a time warp, check out the editorial on the Macintosh’s future I wrote for Microprocessor Report back in September 1996. Remember Copland?)

Last week, after more than a decade as a Windows user, I went back to the Mac. I bought a MacBook Pro, and I have to say I’m really enjoying it. It’s a beautiful machine, with a great display and elegant software.

Why I Did It

This is not something I did lightly. It’s an expensive machine, I had to replace a lot of software, there’s the short-term productivity loss from the learning curve, and now I have to manage a mixed environment (at least until I can convert the rest of my family, which will be a costly proposition).

So why did I do it? There was no single factor, but rather an accumulation of small issues:

• My desktop and notebook PCs were both causing me grief. Various things had stopped working or become very slow, and I knew it was time for the dreaded Windows re-install to clear out the crud.

• My current Thinkpad Z61t, the latest in a long line of Thinkpads I’ve used for years, proved itself to be mechanically inferior to earlier models, have poor wireless range, and a really lousy screen. The MacBook Pro makes the Thinkpad seem like a piece of junk (though other Thinkpad models are better than this one).

• My wife’s PC died, and when we replaced it of course it came with Vista. The experience gave me no joy. It is hard to believe that Microsoft spent so many years and produced something that feels like just a slightly more annoying version of what they had before.

• My business partner is a die-hard Mac fan, and having both of us on the same platform will make life easier in a variety of ways. Most immediately, it means that we can use Keynote for our upcoming seminar presentation, instead of having to user PowerPoint or deal with import/export issues.

• I don’t have to feel like an outcast at Rails gatherings. Now I’m one of the cool kids.

The transition has not been painless, but with lots of support from my partner Christopher I’ve made the transition almost completely over the course of one week.

Why The Rails Community is Mac Crazy

If you’ve ever gone to a gathering of Rails developers, you may have wondered if you had slipped into an alternate reality in which Apple had won the platform wars. Why is this?

Some people will tell you that it is the elegance of the Mac user interface, or the efficiency of TextMate as a Ruby editor. But I think the real answer is that underneath, the Mac is Unix.

When you’re building applications that get deployed on web servers, they generally run under Linux (or perhaps Solaris). It just makes life simpler to run the same operating system on your development machine, and the Mac is a vastly more pleasant desktop environment than what’s available for Linux.

There’s also the occasional Ruby gem, or Rails plugin, that just doesn’t work under Windows. Since the Mac is Unix, whatever works on the server works on the Mac. And all the admin stuff that you have to learn to manage a server makes you a real power user of the Mac.

How Did Apple Pull This Off?

When I wrote Apple off a decade ago, there were three key things I missed:

• Steve Jobs

• The power of niche markets

• The iPod

I don’t think it can be overestimated what an impact Jobs has had on Apple’s success. Having a leader who has a strong sense of what makes a great product, and the guts to drive the company to fulfill that vision, is an incredible asset. It’s not a behavior that professional managers, such as the stewards who almost drove Apple into the ground, are capable of. And the PC industry, with its fierce price-based competition, drives everything toward the least common denominator. Oddly, the dynamics of the proprietary Mac business make innovation easier than in the open, oversupplied PC market.

The other big factor in the Mac’s resurgence is the strength of the Mac in niche markets. If it had a 3% share across all markets, it would indeed be in an unstoppable downward spiral. But in some markets, such as graphic designers and Rails programmers, it seems to have a majority share. The personal computer market is now so large that even niches are sizable businesses.

Finally, there is the iPod. Who could have guessed that Apple would have such a runaway consumer-electronics hit? They’ve sold something like 150 million of them, and they accounted for a quarter of the company’s revenue last year. This gives the company a cash cow that makes it easier to keep investing in the Mac, and it extends the Apple brand in the consumer market, sowing the seeds for future Mac purchases.

It really is amazing what Apple has accomplished.